IST 305- Assignment # 5
Enterprise Applications
Enterprise applications include applications for pay role, supply chain, employ/customer records, accounting and customer service. Enterprise applications involve persistent data that needs to be kept for several years. For an organization, to implement an Enterprise application, it must consider various factors before deciding on the enterprise application provider. The enterprise application can be of different kinds and cater to different segments of the business; it could be for a business to customer or a customer to customer model. Before deciding on an enterprise system, the organization must think about the performance (Moser et al.). The other factors based on which the choice of an enterprise application must be decided the response time, responsiveness, latency, throughput, efficiency, scalability and load factors. The first step to the decision of an enterprise application is the load factor and the nature of work involved. Depending upon the data and the frequency of operations for the organizations an appropriate enterprise application must be decided. Responsiveness is the strength of the system to process and present a response to a request. For an enterprise application to be valuable to an organization, it must be highly responsive on the lines of its user interface, server, response time and database operations. It should have minimum latency and high throughput. Efficiency for an enterprise application is the performance given based on the number of available resources and the load of the system. The load factor must determine the scalability of an enterprise application. Scalability is the capability of the enterprise application to adapt to increasing load of the system (Fowler).
Enterprise Systems Value for Businesses
Enterprise applications like ERP, CRM or SCM, provide a great value for any given organization. An enterprise system consists of different layers of the application enclosing user interface, database management, and file system handling. An enterprise application has inbuilt support for various transport layers and security. An enterprise application is a collection of all solution that an organization would have to implement separately. It provides a streamlined and integrated environment for different layers of the organizational data. Enterprise applications allow persisting data for the long-term and also deriving valuable information. For any enterprise business applications provide a valuable tool to handle everyday operations. Enterprise application integration allows business to share information across the organization, automate it processes, reduce the complexity that comes with Information technology and increases the agility of Information flow within the organization. Enterprise applications consist of different kinds of software handling several types of organizational data like Supply chain, customer relationship, human resource, enterprise planning and business intelligence and analytics (Shang and Peter).
Graybar is a Fortune 500 company that is headquartered in St. Louis, Missouri. It is one of the largest employee-owned companies in North America and a leader in high quality, networking, communication and electrical products. It has revenue that touches $5.7 billion marks.
Impact on Graybar Business
Graybar enjoyed many years of success, but it was not following the best practices when it comes to analyzing and understanding customers. The customer stratification at Graybar presented the customer into three different categories that included core opportunist, marginal opportunist, and service-drain. Where the core and marginal opportunist were less profitable while the service drains wee high profitable but requires high service with low service. Another segment of the customer for Graybar was the loyal customers who bought consistently with nominal expectations of price and service. The problem that Graybar faced was the lack of information on the different customer segment and a proper strategy for handling each of the customer types.
Three Decisions that improved Graybar’s New Customer Analytics System
The first decision of Graybar to maintain 95% of its customer data made it possible for Graybar to derive valuable customer analytics. Secondly, for the benefit of the sales team, Graybar converted the information into a more visual format by partnering with SAP and utilizing its new customer analytics product called SAP customer value intelligence. Thirdly the use of SAP’s in-memory computing platform called HANA benefited the sales people by providing real-time analysis of the customer data, thereby improving sales efficiency.
Enterprise Application Choice: ERP, SCM or CRM
ERP, SCM or CRM are all enterprise applications that serve a different business purpose. From the context of enterprise application integration, there must be a proper sequence of installing each of these enterprise applications for an organization. ERP integrates different facets of an organization that includes operations, product planning, development, manufacturing processes and sales and marketing. An ERP integrates the external and internal information across the entire organization. ERP facilitates the information flow between various business functions. SCM manages the flow of information between different stages of the supply chain from warehouse to inventory. CRM manages the different aspects of customer relationship within an organization with an aim to increase customer retention, loyalty and the profitability of the organization. ERP integrates all the organizational functions and departments. Thereby, it is important for an organization to implement ERP before any other enterprise application. Many times the ERP vendors also offer SCM and CRM capabilities. So it makes sense to install ERP first. After ERP, the SCM must be installed as it automates the logistics involved in the organization. Finally, the CRM application must be installed for handling the customer service related operations (Hendricks, Vinod, and Jeff).
Works Cited
Fowler, Martin. Patterns of enterprise application architecture. Addison-Wesley Longman
Publishing Co., Inc., 2002.
Hendricks, Kevin B., Vinod R. Singhal, and Jeff K. Stratman. "The impact of enterprise systems
on corporate performance: A study of ERP, SCM, and CRM system implementations."
Moser, Louise E., et al. "The Eternal system: An architecture for enterprise applications."
Enterprise Distributed Object Computing Conference, 1999. EDOC'99. Proceedings.
Third International. IEEE, 1999.
Shang, Shari, and Peter B. Seddon. "Assessing and managing the benefits of enterprise systems:
the business manager's perspective." Information systems journal 12.4 (2002): 271-299.
